Monitoring the Changing World

The way towards a ‘civic’ nation?

The British Home Office is proposing to introduce a system of granting/denying British citizenship on the basis of how strongly an immigrant individual favours or criticizes the British democratic system and all its facets.

As the Guardian states: “..those who demonstrate involvement in voluntary work or other forms of “active citizenship” such as canvassing for political parties or being a school governor could get a passport within a year.”

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And presumably criticising the “British democratic system” could cost potential citizens some ‘points’ … The Times notes that this might include attending ‘anti-War’ demonstrations:

“Points would be deducted if an applicant failed to integrate, for criminal or anti-social behaviour or in “circumstances where an active disregard for UK values is demonstrated”. The Home Office was unable to give any explanation of what was meant by failing to integrate into the British way or active disregard for UK values. It has been suggested that migrants who took part in anti-war demonstrations could jeopardise their chances of qualifying for citizenship.”

I think that this system should be extended to all existing UK Citizens. Let everyone start with, say, 100 points and we’ll deduct points for attending anti-war demos, making jokes about MPs, not watching the Queen’s Speech on Christmas day, failing to be interested in Cricket …. Mmmmm, looks like I’m on the next plane out. 🙂

This seems to be fairly typical of the government’s recent approach to citizenship. The inherent problem with proposals like these is that they become hopelessly confused and contradictory when they stray from (relatively) ‘objective’ dimensions like language competence or (non-)criminal behaviour. As the previous comment suggested, there are two fundamental problems here. The first is what are ‘UK/British values’ and who is to define them? For example, attending an anti-war demo (interpreted in the article as ‘unBritish’) might be seen as showing awareness for a British tradition of public protest or recognising that freedom of speech and assembly are (or at least used to be!) fundamental to life in Britain. On the other hand, canvassing for a political party (interpreted as civic-minded, ‘British’ behaviour) might depend on the party: what if the party itself was fundamentally anti-democratic, like the BNP (although obviously the putative immigrant canvasser would have to be white to become a member!), or say a key party policy was the formal institution of sharia law – would that be considered OK by the government? The second problem is the one most obviously flagged up in the recent post, and a perennial flaw with citizenship tests, oaths etc.: more stringent criteria are applied to would-be citizens than to the existing ‘indigenous’ population. For example, I’m sure a lot of people happily reconcile being British and republican (although not many in the (Northern) Irish sense probably), but presumably under schemes like this people would lose a lot of ‘points’ for such sentiment. Equally, I’m sure if criteria of ‘integration’ and ‘civic participation’ were applied to the wider population many would fail miserably, and yet this is only interpreted as incommensurate with Britishness when applied to immigrants.
And finally of course a lot of British citizens don’t actually see themselves as British at all.